With up to six lanes of high-speed asphalt, India's new superhighway is a source of national pride and a symbol of the country's economic boom, linking New Delhi, Calcutta, and Mumbai.

But the Quadrilateral Highway now puts speedy late-model BMWs on the same roadway used by barefoot women balancing jugs of water on their heads, causing a surge in road deaths and injuries across the nation.

India is among many developing nations looking at the mayhem on their highways, and hoping to find ways to save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. New and sobering statistics show that road accidents now are the number two killer of young people age 5 to 29 worldwide. And by 2020, road accidents could constitute the world's third-largest health problem of all ages in terms of disabilities, death, and lost wages.

In this country of 1.1 billion people, an estimated 270 people die each day from road accidents, and specialists predict that will increase by roughly 5 percent a year.

''When you have economic development, a human disaster often follows on the roads," Etienne Krug, the World Health Organization's director of injuries and violence prevention department, said in an interview in South Africa recently. ''There's a big drama going on of all these lives lost. People believed if they were going to be a more developed country, they needed more roads and cars, and the price to pay will be more fatalities. But we can show them this doesn't have to be the case."

Cutting-edge research on road dangers from around the world will be debated next week at an international conference on safety in Durban, South Africa. The event will bring together more than 1,000 scientists, surgeons, and public health specialists.

The new studies draw inspiration from the successes in the 1960s and early 1970s in well-off nations such as the United States, where public campaigns led by Ralph Nader and scientific data helped achieve large reductions in road casualties. But the problems faced now by poorer countries, which account for nearly 90 percent of the world's 1.2 million road deaths annually, are different from those tackled in the West.

For example, enforcing seat belt laws in India would have little effect in a country where less than 5 percent of road travelers are riding in cars -- most are on foot, motorbikes, or carts. Of far greater importance in India, specialists say, will be safer road designs and stiff enforcement of helmet and drunken driving laws.

The Quadrilateral Highway, a 15-year project begun in 1998, passes through Ahmedabad, a city of about 4 million people.

The consequences of the roadway peril were apparent in the city's Civil Hospital one recent day. One man fell off his motorbike on a rain-slicked street, hitting his head on the pavement and losing consciousness. A bicyclist fractured his skull after a man driving a scooter rammed him to the ground. And a 4-year-old girl was riding in a van that collided with a truck, killing her 8-year-old brother and jarring her head so violently that she could no longer see.

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